Education in Nigeria is under threat. Sadly, the threat is coming from those saddled with the responsibility of building the walls of education to conform to the demands of the 21^st century.

The threat is from the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, the President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Professor Emmanuel Osodeke and any other person or institution singing the retrogressive hymn of making 18 years the minimum age for university admission in the country.

On this list is the Chairman, Senate Committee of Tertiary Institutions and TETFund, Senator Muntari Dandutse. Even JAMB has joined this choir of 18-year-benchmark singers.

They want to kill the whizz in our children. While on routine tour of the 2024 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) centres, they suddenly discovered the root cause of the decadence in our universities and tertiary institutions. It is the fact that universities now admit persons as young as 16 years of age instead of 18 years.

“The minimum age of entry into the University is 18, but we have seen students who are 15, 16 years going in for the entrance examination. Mostly, it is the pressure of parents that is causing this. We are going to look at this development because the candidates are too young to understand what the whole university education is all about. This is the period when children migrate from controlled to uncontrolled environment; when they are in charge of their own affairs. But, if they are too young, they won’t be able to manage properly. I think that is part of what we are seeing in the universities today,” he said.

I concur with the minister that there are challenges with tertiary education in Nigeria these days. This argument can be stretched to include every rung of the education ladder, from pre-school to tertiary. But I strongly disagree that admitting persons below 18 years, even when they excelled in the UTME, beating the horde of 18 years and above, is the reason for the decadence in our learning ecosystem. What is decadent and retrogressively so is the thought of shutting gifted children out of the university on account of age. Nigeria is a gifted nation with a preponderance of masterminds, super kids and whizzes. Gifted children are non-conventional. They are far away from the routine. They do not follow the normal curve. At age 13, 14, 15, they are already in the university competing with the minister’s standard 18-year-olds and beating them both in knowledge assimilation and application of same.

It’s important to understand the cause of the minister’s angst. He saw parents at the examination centres. Need I tell the minister that these parents were not there to write the exams for their children or wards. Most, if not all of those parents, were there to ensure the security of their children, the security that the Nigerian government, past and present, has failed to provide. Parents are mindful these days of the security of their family members because of the pervasive insecurity in the country. Some of those children the minister is complaining about travel overseas on holiday unchaperoned. Some had their primary and secondary education overseas and only returned to Nigeria to write the qualifying examination for admission into Nigerian universities.

By the way, Mr. Minister, the university is not “the period when children migrate from controlled to uncontrolled environment; when they are in charge of their own affairs.” In 2024, right under your watch, secondary schools have become ‘uncontrolled environment.’ All the vices including cultism, prostitution, bullying, homosexuality, thievery, kidnapping and more, are complete in secondary schools right under the minister’s watch. So, what makes the university an uncontrolled environment and secondary school, a controlled environment?

Somebody should call the minister, National Assembly, JAMB and others to order. They must not take this primitive, backward action in the 21^st century when under 16s are admitted into Ivy Leagues in far more advanced climes. Nigerians in the Diaspora are, expectedly, among these gifted categories of geniuses confounding the world in these overseas institutions. If these Nigerians were in Nigeria, the system would have redlined them out of the university despite their high IQ and brain power. Nigeria has no university for gifted children. Even if there was any, we would have destroyed its intellectual and scholarly ethos with quota system, a disease that has afflicted every sphere of life in the country.

There is no empirical evidence that under 18s perform better academically in any exam or academic space. In 2019, a 15-year-old boy from Abia State emerged the best candidate in the UTME scoring 347 marks, considered as the highest mark by JAMB. He was trailed closely by a 16-year-old boy from Abia State who came second with a score of 346 marks. The third best result that year was a 17-year-old from Osun State who scored 345. JAMB gave the names of these exceptionally brilliant candidates as Ekene Franklin, Emmanuel Chidiebube and Oluwo Isaac Olamilekan respectively. The minister may call for details from JAMB to verify how under-18 candidates fared in the UTME compared to over-18 candidates. This should be the empirical basis to rain out smart children from the university on account of age. The tragedy of the Nigerian situation is that 15-year-old Ekene Franklin whose first choice was the University of Lagos (one of Nigeria’s Ivy Leagues) was denied admission that year for being under-age. Age is promoted above intelligence. What a system?

President Bola Tinubu should prevail on these ageists before they finally shove the nation’s education coffin into the grave. These days and these times, the children are smarter, more aware and far more adaptive. In the Americas, Europe and Asia, governments are reworking their education curricula to suit the emerging dynamics in the tech agora and to maximise the genius that define the new-age kids. It’s for these reasons that under-16s are now students at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc. In 2011, then 15-year-old Saheela Ibraheem, a Nigerian-American, became one the youngest students admitted to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was also accepted into Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Williams College, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington University in St. Louis, but she chose Harvard after visiting and ‘falling in love’ with the university. In Mamman’s Nigeria, the genius roaring in young Saheela would have been dimmed, shut down like Nigeria’s national grid of darkness.

In 2022, another Nigerian, 13-year-old Emmanuella Mayaki, grabbed the headlines as one of the youngest persons to be accepted into a university in the U.S, the Mary Baldwin University, Virginia, to study Computer Science. It’s a long list of Nigerian A-graders who are flying the Nigerian flag in universities across the globe as under-16s.

Rather than shut these whizkids out, the Federal Government should prescribe waivers for them or set up a special university for gifted children whose only entry qualification should be a very high UTME score, not age, or quota system. Let’s help our gifted kids stoke the fire in them rather than quench it. Ageism should not take the place of excellence.

First published in Sunday Sun